6.5 million fill in brackets. How do you rank?

ESPN’s tournament challenge set the bracket record for entries this year–read the complete article here.

Ever wonder how your bracket measures up against, not only your co-workers in the office pool, but everyone else in the country? Each year, the ESPN Fantasy section on ESPN.com logs millions of brackets to its free-to-play Tournament Challenge game, now in its 15th year. This year, ESPN logged a new record 6.45 million brackets, 8.9 percent more than 2011. Everyone can check how their brackets are doing against their friends within a specific group, but only ESPN has an inside peek at the top brackets from around the country.

This is exactly how we have been using our own tournament pool to track the various mathematical methods used by students and others to fill out their brackets. March Mathness has been a lot of fun, but it turns out we’re not the only math nuts out there. John Diver, Senior Director of Product Development at ESPN Fantasy sounds pretty mathy too. Check out some of the stats that he can pull from the pool of brackets:

After the brackets are announced on Selection Sunday, the tool goes beyond the public-facing “National Bracket” and “Who Picked Whom” pages to search different combinations of predictions. For example, we can determine what percentage of overall brackets have all the No. 1 seeds for each round up to the Final Four.

(97.7%) predicted Kentucky and Syracuse and Michigan State and North Carolina to advance to the Round of 32; (67.9%) predicted all four No. 1 seeds to advance to the Sweet Sixteen (28.3%) predicted all four No. 1 seeds to advance to the Elite Eight (4.3%) predicted all four No. 1 seeds to advance to the Final Four

We just posted a Q&A with two former March Mathness winners — their bracket was ranked 834 in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge and was in the top 100th percentile (hard to beat 100%) so these math methods do work. What do you think, will you be using math to fill in your bracket next year?